Liam glanced at him in shock. He had to know. He had to have heard it.

Black Ryan smirked. “I’m joking, you idiot. They call me that to my face. I’m pretty sure you’ve called me that to my face.”

Liam picked up a particularly nasty wad of brown paper towels, gum, and hair. “But does it bother you?”

Black Ryan shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s confusing. Why not call the other Ryan White Ryan, right? And me just Ryan? Is Ryan a white name that I appropriated, so just to clarify things let’s call me Black Ryan?”

Okay, so it did bother him. And he’d thought about it a lot.

“Yeah, I don’t know. It’s stupid.” Liam pushed the full bucket out of the way with the toe of his sneaker. “From now on I’m just calling you Ryan.”

“Whatever,” Ryan said. “Hey, after this do you want to get pizza? I can’t really think about food right now, but I know I’m hungry.”

Liam was supposed to report to his mom after he finished in the bathrooms.

“Yeah, sure. I have to meet my mom first though. She’s the nurse here, remember?”

Ryan grinned. “Oh, I remember. Your mom is cool, but she hates us. She wants us to lick this bathroom clean.”

Liam laughed. “She does. She totally does.”

When he’d shown his mom the crappy dark video of Bruce attempting to slide down the schoolyard slide through a puddle of flaming vodka, all she’d said was, “Idiots.”

“My mom is always talking about how nothing bad has ever happened to me. Like, we didn’t have to relocate to a refugee camp where I had to walk ten miles barefoot through the snow to learn math. She’s hoping this is the thing that will make me not take my ‘privilege’ for granted.”

Ryan chucked a tiny stray SpongeBob sock into the trash. “Your mom and my mom sound like they’re both smoking the same hookah. Actually, she calls me Black Ryan sometimes too, kind of making fun of our school and all the assholes who go there. She’ll be like, ‘Time to set the table, Black Ryan,’ when I’m on PlayStation too long, or, ‘Black Ryan, did you read your Dickens?’ My dad would not think it’s funny at all, but he doesn’t get to have an opinion because he doesn’t even live here.”

Liam knew Ryan’s parents were divorced. His dad lived in Florida.

“I told my mom it’s not funny, it’s offensive. Like, maybe if I came up with the name myself it’d be funny and empowering, but I didn’t.”

“Yeah.” Liam was sorry the whole Black Ryan thing was even a thing.